News for Library Nerds, November 22, 2013

Goodbye Thomas.gov! All of the legislative information you love will now be on Congress.gov.

MOOCs as a way to get study subjects.Or qualified employees. 

Need an icon for that? Here’s an interview with the founder of the Noun Project, which aims to create simple icons for everything. I was hoping for an icon for "online library," but I guess there's just not enough call for that yet.

Just in case your family doesn’t know what to get you for the holidays, you can send them this list. 

Students do better when the instructor is organized. And what are librarians if not organized? 

News for Library Nerds, November 15, 2013

A big win for Google in their book scanning case. This is making a lot of open-access proponents very happy, but I wonder how academic book publishers will respond.

Netflix & Youtube dominate our Internet usage, and file sharing is a thing of the past. 

HBR’s extra costs making librarians hopping mad. Where the norms of academia and the norms of business collide. And Library Babel Fish just wants to say “no” to HBR and everyone else. I'd love to say no, too, but just one week of no PDF printing for HBR articles was a reference headache.

African countries pushing to create more PhDs. I find it interesting that it doesn't mention the role of PhD-granting online programs. You no longer have to leave home to get an advanced degree from an accredited American university (well, not quite totally true - our doctoral students do travel to a few residencies, but that's a few weeks versus several years.).

Update on the business side of the big names in Ed Tech. Do you hear some bubbles popping?

News for Library Nerds, October 26, 2013

This week was Open Access Week! Did you miss it? I almost did.

Why aren’t librarians making their own work open access?

More on the citation gender gap. Not only do men self-cite more than women, academics appear to prefer to cite members of their own gender.

How scientific research can often get things wrong, and then fail to correct them. For a short video showing how statistical results can fail.

And when it does fail, it’s too hard to publish criticism.

Dog gets MBA. 

Machine-generated citations just don’t cut it. 

Amazon scaling back their publishing arm. 

In 2019 we may start seeing items fall out of copyright protection - unless they extend it again. Here’s an overview of what’s happened to get copyright law where it is, and why this time it might be different.

News for Library Nerds: August 9, 2013

Congressional Hearings on Copyright issues are underway in Washington this summer. Maybe they'll do something useful, and we'll be able to get more midcentury books. Not that I don't love reading older stuff, but let's have a bit more parity, please.

Ebooks and Libraries are the conversation on Morning Edition on NPR.

University of California going open access, affecting up to 40,000 research papers a year. 

Is the ebook boom over? Sales growth of ebooks have slowed, and there are a few theories about why. I find myself agreeing. As someone who turned into an avid ebook reader on both an ereader and a tablet, it's clear that there are some drawbacks to electronic versions that the software developers still haven't addressed. It makes me wonder if the real problem with ebooks is that the software is designed by people who don't actually read books very much.

Should legal codes be behind a paywall? Or should they be free to the public? There’s a court case working on that question right now. 

Teeny tiny book is finally read. Given how hard it is to read, it's remarkable it was even produced!

If you haven’t seen them before, ACRL’s Keeping Up With... series gives short overviews of hot topics in libraries and academia. 

List of resources related to library support for MOOCs. 

Here's some interesting stuff on book covers. The difficulty of designing a cover for Lolita.

And what “gender-flipped” book covers would look like. I'm now imagining a copy of Pride and Prejudice with Darcy  and Wickham on the cover, but that may just get me lots of Twitter hate. Jane Austen seems to bring that out in some people.

Finally, a note on all the speculation about Jeff Bezos' purchase of the Washington Post. I find myself a bit skeptical, like John Cassidy. But I've always had a prejudice against anything that starts to smell like a monopoly. We'll just have to wait and see.

200 Fantastic Years of Pride and Prejudice

It's been 200 years since Pride and Prejudice was first published, and I can't let it go by without comment. I freely admit to being a huge Austen fan; she's one fantastic novelist, and Persuasion is my all-time favorite novel.

Years ago, when I'd worked through all of Austen, I decided to try reading some of the works that inspired her. This wasn't a very scientific endeavor (I started with books that are referenced in Northanger Abbey), but it was very interesting. The BBC recently posted a list of some of the novels that were popular at the time Austen was writing. Looking back I can see that I actually read a fair number of the listed works.

If all you ever read from the turn of the 19th century is Austen, you end up with a very different picture of that world than if you read more broadly. I can't say that any of the other authors have the gift of writing novels the way Austen does, but they certainly portray a wilder world. Burney, Edgeworth, and Lennox are packed with duels, cross-dressing, kidnapping, suicide, and monkey attacks. Yes, monkey attacks. And that list doesn't even include The Monk!

While Austen's work is truly wonderful, it can feel a bit sanitized. The gothic novels and picaresques of the 18th century certainly aren't any more realistic than Austen's work, but when all are read together it's easier to remember that the world wasn't actually a simpler, safer place back then. It just had less plumbing and a more complicated syntax.

First Week in a MOOC

I just finished the first set of lectures and quiz in my attempt at taking a MOOC (massive open online course). So far, so good.

We'll see how I feel at the end of this experience, but at present it feels more like independent learning than a class. This is partly due to my own decision to have limited involvement in the discussion forums. I barely have time to devote to the 3-5 hours of required work each week, and online forums can be a complete time suck. So, yes, I'm mostly avoiding them.

I'm taking Data Analysis via Coursera, which is organized as a series of short lectures each week followed by a quiz. The short lectures make it possible to stretch them over the course of several days, which is very useful since I spend every lecture frequently pausing so I can take notes and go over the content of the slide a second time. The quizzes are more like complicated homework assignments than quizzes. They are not just "open book," but actually require that you go outside the course to find information that then is used to answer the question. It's not a traditional format for a quiz, but it does fit one of the points of this course: this course won't teach you everything, and you will need to learn how find answers to your data analysis questions.

Along those lines, one of the first lectures was 10 minutes on how to ask a question. As a reference librarian, this lecture really struck a chord. There may not be any stupid questions, but there sure are a lot of questions that are worded so poorly that no one has any hope of answering them. A colleague once referred to these as "word salad" questions, and that's what a lot of them look like. My favorite slide in the lecture showed "bad" questions, which in his mind included the word "HELP" and lots of exclamation points, but not much else. I have certainly seen my share of those. There are times that I wish everyone had to take an entire course in high school about asking questions. I'm sure that many doctors, mechanics, and other professionals working with specialized knowledge wish that as well.

It feels good to have successfully completed my first quiz. I'm still not sure that I'll survive this whole course, though. It requires learning how to use the R statistical package, with all of its programming codes, along with the course content. (Thanks Code School for getting me started with R!) I've also never taken a probability or statistics course, so there's a ton of new content here. Let's hope I've picked up enough knowledge as an academic librarian to quickly fit everything together into a coherent whole. I've got seven more weeks to figure it all out.